Memphis Lee's diner--and the rest of his block--is scheduled to be torn down, a casualty of the city's renovation project that is sweeping away the buildings of a community, but not its spirit. As they try to fight back, we meet Sterling, the ex-con who embraces the tenets of Malcolm X; Wolf, the bookie who has learned to play by the white man's rules; Risa, a waitress of quiet dignity who has mutilated her legs to distance herself from men; and Holloway,...

Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's first full-length drama, hailed in Europe as "the play of the decade" and compared in importance to Waiting for Godot. Kaspar is the story of an autistic adolescent who finds himself at a complete existential loss on the stage, with but a single sentence to call his own. Drilled by prompters who use terrifyingly funny logical and alogical language-sequences, Kaspar learns to speak "normally" and eventually becomes...

The French Revolution of 1789 had grand humanitarian aims that would one day inspire the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Russians took the French revolutionary agenda and reinforced it with sturdy German philosophy to form a beautiful vision in which remnants of theology combined with the power of art as a force for change.0The Arc of Utopia offers a fresh look at the German philosophical origins of the Russian Revolution. Lesley Chamberlain relates...

"We don't understand the reactionary mind. As a result, argues Mark Lilla in this timely book, the ideas and passions that shape today's political dramas are unintelligible to us. The reactionary is anything but a conservative. He is as radical and modern a figure as the revolutionary, someone shipwrecked inthe rapidly changing present, and suffering from nostalgia for an idealized past and an apocalyptic fear that history is rushing toward catastrophe....

"Great Books of China invites readers to discover--or rediscover--some of the major achievements of Chinese culture and civilization. The literature of China remains largely unknown in the West, yet it offers much insight into Chinese life. The long continuity of Chinese culture means that texts created more than two thousand years ago are still part of the education and background of today's China. Great Books of China introduces outstanding works...

From Wall Street to Main Street, John Brooks, longtime contributor to the New Yorker, brings to life in vivid fashion twelve classic and timeless tales of corporate and financial life in America. What do the $350 million Ford Motor Company disaster known as the Edsel, the fast and incredible rise of Xerox, and the unbelievable scandals at General Electric and Texas Gulf Sulphur have in common? Each is an example of how an iconic company was defined...

"With a history stretching back nearly 1,500 years, Japan literature encompasses a vast range of forms and genres. Since the eighth century, poetry and the non-philosophical lyric voice have occupied a central position in Japanese literary expression. The art of narrative blossomed in the eleventh century with one of the world's great literary masterpieces, Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji and later in the work of the great modern novelists Natsume...

"The stunning first installment of a new American Odyssey, set over the course of the Civil War, and penned by Pulitzer Prize & Tony Award winner Suzan-Lori Parks (Topdog/Underdog). Offered his freedom if he joins his master in the ranks of the Confederacy, Hero, a slave, must choose whether to leave the woman and people he loves for what may be yet another empty promise. As his decision brings him face-to-face with a nation at war with itself, the...